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Metal meets Limestone

Ohbijou’s thirds album, Metal Meets, was released on Tuesday and had the band travelling outside the familiarity of Toronto to untraversed locations like volcanoes and haunted waterfalls found around the world.

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Supplied by Reynard Li

Ohbijou will launch a North American tour this month, in support of their new release, Metal Meets.

Lead vocalist and songwriter Casey Mecija said the band wanted to make the whole album a love story, based on the title track.
Metal Meets is Ohbijou’s third album, following the 2009 Beacons and the 2006 Swift Feet for Troubling Times. With two years since their last album, Ohbijou had plenty of time to gather inspiration for the new album.

“We’re definitely older and have a weight of more experiences under our belt,” Mecija said, “I think the accumulation of different experiences has resulted in an album that kind of looks at the world with a little more depth and complexity.”

Mecija said Metal Meets is moodier and more complex than Ohbijou’s previous efforts.

“A lot of the lyrics and the subject matter of the album is very much inspired by love,” she said. “The other two albums were inspired by that as well, but I think with this new record, it was more about finding a new language of how to articulate that feeling.”

Lyrics were inspired by books that Mecija has indulged in, such as Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson.

“[Carson] has such an amazing way of describing feelings — really desperate feelings — by using words like red and giving emotions colours and things like that,” Mecija said.

Mecija said the band chose “Niagara” as the album’s opening track because it has a deliberately strong chord structure. Mecija said the song title’s resemblance to the name of a famous Canadian landmark was no coincidence.

“I was trying to describe these feelings of love by paralleling it with that sort of weather and environmental element,” she said. “It’s just comparing the force of the falls to the force of a feeling of love.”

Ohbijou is preparing for a North American tour, with the first show scheduled in Toronto.

Before the release of Swift Feet for Troubling Times, Ohbijou was Mecija’s solo project. She soon felt the need for a full band including her sister Jennifer.

“We know how to make each other upset, but in the end, the underlying thing is that it’s more of a relief that we’re together,” Mecija said, “And it would be sad if I didn’t have [Jennifer] singing and playing beside me. So I feel lucky to play with Jenny.”

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